The poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote a famous short story about a society that had become so good at making maps, so obsessed with capturing every detail, that its rulers decided the only way to do the job right was to make a lifesize map of its entire empire, which could then be laid out across the actual land from coast to coast. Imagine a map of Britain the exact same size as Britain, showing every branch of Greggs, every nail bar, every vape shop in perfect detail. Only then can we really see what Britain looks like, by standing on a fake Britain laid over the top of actual Britain.<\/p>\n
Borges was writing in the 1940s, at a time when people were fascinated by the mechanised future, with its new forms of measuring out the world: the wireless, the 30mph motorcar, the rise of Big Tape Measure. And to be fair, the mega-map is a pretty accurate vision of our own fully networked present, a place where you can snoop around a village in Mozambique from your laptop in Egham, where no one ever stops committing acts of minute self-surveillance, even if they think they\u2019re just searching \u201cWhat is beetroot?\u201d on the internet.<\/p>\n
Borges also hated football. \u201cSoccer is popular because stupidity is popular,\u201d he wrote, which probably seemed a bold statement at the time. But then Borges also didn\u2019t live to see an episode of Wow Sports Premier League Breakfast at Breakfast with Roger McRoger and a puzzled Lee Trundle. After which, perhaps less of a surprise. But the process he describes is also a good description of what football is doing to itself. Endless data, endless analysis, no spaces or free air, matches that are just schematised movement. At times it can feel like football is out there laying a lifesize real-time map on top of itself.<\/p>\n
In Borges\u2019s story, the land soon begins to decay beneath the massive map \u2013 which is reassessed by later generations as insane, pointless and stupid \u2013 and left to rot in the desert. We haven\u2019t reached this point. Nobody is de-mapping football. But it does perhaps explain why everyone gets so excited when a talent emerges that seems to be playful and human, to exist outside the grid. And also why it has felt wrong to gush too soon about Max Dowman, to fear placing the hex on him. We know how this works. Here is a fluffy new thing. Let us break him. Let us heap pressure on his shoulders. Don\u2019t talk about Max Dowman. Let Max Dowman exist, breathe, bloom in the shadows.<\/p>\n
So, Max Dowman then. It has become quite hard to ignore him. He was brilliant against Ipswich in midweek<\/a>, and brilliant in a way that seems solid and real and comfortable with itself. Most obviously there were the two goals, both a perfect snapshot of why Dowman seems equipped to survive, more state\u2011of\u2011the\u2011art than some other young players we\u2019ve burdened with expectation.<\/p>\n